10 Ways to Take Responsibility for Your Life

Many people say they would like to change their lives or make positive changes but seem to encounter obstacles, complain, feel restless or postpone taking decisive action.  Now is the moment to be more pro-active.  Consider 10 ways to take greater responsibility for your life:

1. Prioritize Yourself

To take more control of life, deep down, we must feel worthy, deserving of good things, better decisions. Holding self-limiting beliefs, perpetuating negative self-talk ("I can't or won't...")  causes us to avoid responsibility.  Thus, we may feel undeserving of better. Thing is, we can only love and support others if we love and support self first, practice self-love and self-care.

2. Stop Blaming the External

Although common practice, blaming others for our conditions is a form of self-sabotage, an unconscious attempt to escape from growing up (maturing as a soul). Society teaches us to and judge others rather than address our own actions. When we are hyper-focused on other people’s behaviours, we often overlook signs and signals we give ourselves and available big life lessons.

3. Develop Self-Awareness

To take responsibility for our thoughts and actions, we must grow self-aware. Self-reflection allows us to deepen awareness.  To grow mindful of feelings, thoughts as they arise, helps us understand our actions,  patterns and reasons behind the things we do.

4. Be Accountable

Being responsible entails being accountable to yourself.  Some people love external praise and their own positive feelings and yet find it hard to realize they are the source of all their behaviour, perception, feelings, or results. Pride blocks growth.  To be accountable is to accept and understand our role in each situation.  How we are treated depends on how we treat ourselves. The key is self-honesty, not avoiding transparency. Of course, self-pity and guilt are not helpful.

5. Get to Know Yourself

Turns out, we are conditioned to adopt other people’s beliefs about us.  Beyond external conditioning, we all have our own sense of success and happiness.  Though family and peers may have good intentions, we cannot act to appease others and live in integrity.  If parents may want their child to look a certain way, choose a specific training, career, or partner. We would not blindly listen if we took steps to get to know self, our version of happiness and success. This requires self-honesty.  We may even need to separate from people who constantly impose their views.  This can create internal conflict, complicating our decision-making.

6. Love Yourself

Taking responsibility can be difficult until we love ourselves enough to get that every moment, we control our thoughts, feelings and life direction. Realizing this changes things.  When we judge ourselves harshly, we throw off our inner balance. We feel ungrounded, unsupported, unsustainable, and very discouraged. Self-love guides us to the wisdom within the self. A mere shift in perspective is a potent action in the name of love.

7. Eliminate Excuses

To make excuses is not responsible, like denying you are the captain of your ship. An irresponsible person may say they want to eat healthier but say they don’t have time. However, to be responsible, accountable, and honest, is to prioritize creating time. We can find many reasons not to make life changes.  Yet, this is giving our power away. We all have the same 24 hours per day. We are all responsible for how we choose to use it.

8. Remove Toxic People

Toxic people enable us to continue unhealthy habits and toxic behaviour. People who genuinely care for us and love us will hold you accountable.  They want to see us achieve our dreams. Other individuals want to keep us  co-dependent.  To take responsibility for life means taking responsibility for our entourage, and relationships. People who frequently complain, self-loathe, self-deprecate, and speak down on your progress do not benefit our growth.  Creating distance brings us inner strength. Nourish healthy and supportive interaction. Also, seek to establish emotional independence to make better decisions from an objective stance and attract authentic people into our life experience.

9. Eradicate Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk can arise from childhood trauma inflicted by abuse or bullying. These negative, self-limiting beliefs we have of ourselves usually originate from the projections and judgments other people throw at us. When we are younger, we tend to internalize these words, and they become ingrained. It takes time to un-condition such negative ideas about Self. However, it’s possible by doing activities aimed at self-love and self-care. We come into this world with a very clean slate.  As we grow, we begin to take on our personality. Much of this has to do with the environments. However, we can take responsibility for our lives and reclaim our full potential.

10.  Take Quantum Leaps outside Comfort Zones

The only way to truly take full and complete responsibility for our lives is to rediscover what it is to experience examples of fearlessness. This may begin in a playground swing,  allowing ourselves to fear the wind in our hair as we pump the swing higher.  As we gain courage and confidence, we increasingly make choices to do what we have not done before, confront our fears and see where assertiveness and adventurousness take us.  This may guide us to new job, new relationships, new entourage, new pastimes and ways to spend out time.  Remind yourself the five people you spend the most time with are the five people you are becoming.

Get back to what is real

Notice pure consciousness is. 'You' arise by taking on projections of the world around you. Pure consciousness is colored by them. "Your" identity takes shape as you decide to accept or modify the projections. That decision gets repressed in the unconscious and becomes a fixation. Once repressed, you can no longer change it. Your thinking process grows from projections and your decisions arise as the basis of thought. Ego (who you believe you are) arises from who you are told you are. The false idea of you stems from early projections, decisions and fixations. It's like ego is the image you see in the mirror. The basis of the underlying operating system (beyond the mirror) often goes unrecognized. The ego wants center stage. Eliminate the operating system, and the ego disappears ('you' see no reflection). Yet, to hold 'your' attention, ego imagines problems. This prevents you from seeing behind the curtain/mirror. By thinking it's unworthy, in need of improving, ego prolongs its false existence. As long as ego can maintain the illusion of imperfection, 'you' do not see ego arises from false logic. No entity really bears your name, personality, or sense of person-hood. It's an illusion created by pure consciousness, filtered through primary projections. To eliminate the fixation, grow aware the projections are false. By imagining inadequacies, you perpetuate suffering and the illusion of separation. The real issue is the projections only arise because originally what was offered was a lack of love. Do not trust the projection that produced 'your ego'. It was not God saying he did not love you, it was people in your life that unknowingly withheld /did not provide constant, unconditional love. No matter how much self-improvement you do at level of ego, you are still unworthy because of the structure of the ego. No matter what cosmetic changes you make, no matter how much money you obtain, none of it will end the projection the core of the ego desire to improve itself. Only by growing conscious you are a Being of Light does the desire for love shift beyond Ego processes and yearn for improvement. Innermost Source of love is pure consciousness from where all creativity comes. Be the endless field of abundance, joy and bliss.

5 Lessons from the Courage to be Disliked

Books that appear in our scope are guides on our path to greater fulfillment.Everything can be viewed as a teacher with a message when we are open to it.  Many people  list favorite spiritual books and such lists are often changing.

The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga  is a book full of surprising lessons.  I read it in the airport recently while awaiting a connection. Its conversational style is engaging yet requires paying attention to keep track of changing points of view. Millions of copies sold in Asia already, reading the English translation invites discovery of why its popularity is growing. When ready, readers of Kishimi and Koga's book are invited to grow aware of their own reflections and projections.

It is like a modern take on Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind that incorporates what Fumitake Koga describes as "the shock value of Adlerian psychology." Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of "Individual Psychology." Adler viewed human beings as an individual whole. Along with Freud and Jung, Adler is viewed as one of three highly influential minds of psychology of the 19th century.

In a nutshell, the book unfolds through exchanges between a philosopher and student. The philosopher explains to his pupil how each human being exists to determine our own life, free from the limits of past experiences, doubts, and the expectations of others. The book invites readers reflect on what is deeply liberating, on what or whom allows us to reach inside ourselves to find the courage to change.  It is set up to invite readers to see through self-created limitations other people seem to place on us. Ponder these five lessons that stand out:

1. Accept you cannot please everyone

To say yes to everything and everyone, is setting yourself up for a fall. To be true to yourself means accepting how you feel, expressing your truth and accepting everyone is not going to agree with you or see the world in the same way you do. Agree to disagree and life is then much simpler.

2. Discover all relationship problems mirror inner conflict

The view offered is that we create relationships as a means to get to know ourselves.  This problems we think we have with others point to our unconscious resistance to accepting parts of our shadow.

3. See that seeking recognition is an ego trap

Instead of seeking recognition, pinpoint why you do not recognize yourself as you are, why you resists recognizing and celebrating what you have already achieved, or why you resist giving yourself recognition.

4. Discard other people's tasks

You are taught to live according to other people's views, desires, direction and percpetion of life pupose and experiences. Turns out, stepping back and recognizing who and what you truly live for is a thought-provoking and potentially life-transforming journey.

5. Trusting yourself and being confident are not the same

Feeling inferior or superior, making choices in life to reinforce related unconscious beliefs are stepping stones to growing aware of the bigger game that you are playing. No valid excuse exists for hiding from truth.  You only begin to see through and dismantle smokescreens when the ego becomes a friend and teacher. 

3 Key Benefits to being more bold and daring

This is the perfect moment to allow yourself to unleash what has been waiting for you to notice it.  Call it untapped potential or life-changing inspiration. Here are three key benefits of being more bold and daring:

1. Letting go of the old allows embracing the new

Stepping outside your comfort zone allows you to discover that the comfort zone was actually uncomfortable.

2. Acting spontaneously is being in the flow of synchronicity

Seeing opportunities and intuitively acting on what resonates, allows you to see clearer that you are always assisting yourself. 

3. Shifting from fear-based decision-making into a love inspired existence 

Choosing is about hesitation. Moving beyond examination and reflection is being guided solely by love. This reminds you the more bold and daring you are, the more you appreciate and accept what makes you tick.

Knowing what is best

At different life stages, it is common to feel lost and to ask, 'how do I know what is best for me right now?' 

People are compelled to reach outside themselves, to experience situations where they are inspired or discover they are not.  It is where they explore what life is about.

Sometimes a person benefits from a guide to help understand what it is in each place or relationship that attracts or repels.  Each teacher and discovery empowers a person to find out more him or herself.

Come what may, questions can arise. Each person forms decisions based on a variety of data available; the wisdom of the ages, the current view of Science, the highest ideals of the heart, moral guides and mentors. Ultimately, each human being is responsible for his/her own decisions.

In some ways, conscience draws attention to two kinds of spiritual questions; one relates to thoughts of what is right or wrong, linked to ingrained rules.  The other is how to be a spiritual person. That is, how does one live and act in harmony with divine nature? How does one tune into the cycles of the universe, inner spontaneity and inspiration and be aware of the divine in everything? Soulful exploration helps one expand awareness.

It is one thing to choose between good and evil as defined by the external world.  It is quite another to discern the difference between the impulses of divine nature and cravings of the conditioned ego self.  Being a moral (judgemental) person and a wholly person (who sees/acts from wholeness) are two different things. Regardless of the path taken, a guiding light helps along the way.